Have you considered the issue of quality control in the creation of the voting ballots? Do you know for sure that all the ballots were pre-perfed properly? If the chads were not sufficiently pre-perforated, then the voter would be trying to poke a hole in fairly stiff oaktag. That would result in dimpled ballots.
Is it “fairly stiff”? let’s see some numbers. What is the lbs needed to punch the chad. Let’s see the lbs to punch the paper.
Mr. Zambezi, your insistence on evidence is somewhat admirable. But presumably this is ground already covered, in that the State of Texas has officially set standards that count ‘dimpled’ chads. One suspects that the legislators of Texas didn’t do so just out of the blue, or only on the basis of rumor and innuendo.
Dimpled chads could occur in three ways that I can think of. First, something behind the card prevents the downward motion of the chad sufficient to allow tearing of the perforated edge. Second, the machine settings might be such that the stylus is unable to push down far enough to force such tearing. Third, the card may be held so loosely that it gives way before the stylus, making it more unlikely that the pressure applied would tear the perforations. Note that in all three cases, depending on how the card is held in the machine, the result would not necessarily be uniform across the entire card.
A significant number of pregnant and dimpled ballots existed, which was remarkable given that we were looking at the results of one race only in each county. What you have failed to do is offer a valid explanation of how such results could have occurred without being the result of stylus pressure. Under the circumstances, and given that dimples have been recognized by more than one state as being an indication of an attempt to vote, I think the burden shifts to those who would establish that dimples and pregnancies occur from something OTHER than attempts to vote.
The maker of the “chad” machine testified that he invented a new stylus (which was never used) because the stylus in use had to be held perpendicular to effectively punch out a chad. He admitted that if the stylus was at an angle, the chad may not be effectively punched. A 4th way.
Z,
I could produce numbers that would demonstrate that it would take a damned jackhammer to punch the chad and it wouldn’t change your mind. You’ve decided that the voters who punched dimpled chads are a bunch of feebs who decided to fling away their votes because they couldn’t be bothered to do it right, and no one is going to change your opinion. So frankly, it’s just not worth it.
Researcher Tony Siegel came up with this quote from a 1964 article entitled “College Entrance Tests Fail To Ruffle Students’ Aplomb” from the Washington Post.
“Similarly poised was Albert Gore, 16, another St. Albans 12th-grader whose father of the same name is the senior U.S. Senator from Tennessee. Young Gore, who aims to study liberal arts and pre-law at Harvard University, said he’d found some of the questions ‘pretty tricky.’ But he seemed mainly concerned that he might have left a few stray marks on his papers that would mislead the ‘dumb machine’ that scores them electronically.”
It’s a conspiracy.